INsight/ Activating Your PNS

Photo by Getty Images on Unsplash.

Ubud, 27 November 2024 — How little floating awareness clouds can boost your leadership.

“When the time is urgent, we must slow down.” — Bayo Akomolafe

Story

It happened in 1898. Researchers discovered that our autonomic nervous system has two parts that work very differently. The Sympathetic Nervous System (SNS) and Parasympathetic Nervous System (PNS) are two branches of the Autonomic Nervous System (ANS), which controls our involuntary body functions. They work in opposition to each other in regulating your physiological and mental states, significantly influencing your behavior, decision-making, and leadership ability.

Further research in the 20th century described how the SNS protects us by triggering our “fight or flight” response to handle stress and survival. With a mental state of heightened alertness, focus, and readiness for action, SNS activation can lead to anxiety, impulsivity, or tunnel vision if overactive. It helps you in high-stakes and crisis situations that require quick decisions and assertiveness. Chronic SNS activation (e.g., high stress) can impair your decision-making, empathy, and collaboration. Unfortunately, we see too much of this in our workplaces. Our SNS is not so sympathetic after all, I concluded. 

The PNS works in the opposite direction. It activates the “rest and digest” or “relax and restore” response, promoting recovery. Our body and mental state will be calm, relaxed, and reflective, supporting creativity, empathy, and problem-solving. These are tremendous benefits for effective leaders to tap into. PNS enables your long-term thinking, emotional regulation, and team-building. On the negative side, over-reliance on your PNS can result in procrastination or a lack of urgency in pressing situations. How to get more of those PNS benefits and avoid triggering our SNS unnecessarily?

Challenge

Considering the amount of stress experienced in our workplaces today, the risk you run every day is to have your SNS triggered without experiencing an actual threat to your survival. After all, there won’t be a tiger waiting in your office to strike and eat you for lunch or dinner. Yet your work challenges will still produce the same kind of body-mind stress in your SNS. Now, you might think that the ‘autonomic’ in your ANS suggests that there isn’t much you can do about your SNS getting triggered. In practice, however, there is a lot that you can do to de-stress with awareness and spend more time activating your PNS, allowing you to benefit from its many positive effects on your life and leadership. 

Each time your body and mind get triggered by your SNS into a fight or flight response, you can practice your awareness in order to help you shift to your PNS as soon as possible. This doesn’t happen automatically. You need to learn and practice how to do this. Stress is experienced by all leaders on their journey. The more accomplished and impactful you become as a leader, the more work responsibilities will come to you, and that will bring stress that will regularly activate your SNS. That is why learning to shift your body-mind from SNS to  PNS is such an essential skill. 

Here is where we can learn from this week’s quote. “When the time is urgent, we must slow down,” says Bayo Akomolafe, a Gen Y Nigerian philosopher, author, and advocate for social and ecological change. His advice runs counter to what we normally do when we feel stressed: we tend to rush and finish much as we can in a short time. That often brings tunnel vision and a lack of openness. Bayo, however, focuses on rethinking conventional approaches to crisis and urgency. He encourages a reflective, slower response as a way to deeply engage with complex challenges without reacting hastily. That slower response will help you to shift your mind and body from SNS to PNS.

Question

My question for you this week is what you will do to slow down when the time is urgent? How can you shift your mind and body from your SNS to your PNS? This can be done in many ways, and leaders will work on making this happen as often as possible. 

Looking at this week’s photo, imagine that your mind-body system is red hot with stress over your urgent and important tasks. And then look up, and see with your mind’s awareness that there are cute little white clouds of awareness floating close by. No matter how stressed you are with your SNS, your PNS is always available to you, and it’s closer than you think.  

Your leadership journey is full of challenges, including those you give yourself and those who come to you unrequested and without your permission. “Challenge” is one of the words that comes up very frequently in our leadership coaching work. We use positive psychology research to coach you through transitions, and we help you to manage your SNS and maximize the benefits of your PNS. Set up a free strategy call to discuss how you want to activate your PNS and multiply your positive impact as a leader in 2025. Discover how those fluffy white clouds can help you.